Too Hollywood

Fight Club rocks.

And I see your point - I've noticed that movies influence how I write, too. I find myself trying to play it out shot-by-shot, and sometimes this works. Sometimes, though it doesn't.
Three personal guidelines are:

If it's a war, then it needs bare minimum: He turned and stabbed the man behind him before spinning to face a new attack.

If it's a one on one fight with a minor character, there's a little more description, but the fight will still be summarized.

If it's the climax and the hero's facing the main evil dude, there will be more detail.

But, then again, anything that works...

I know I incline to an excessively visual style -- when I write I envision things in my head, to the extent that I almost feel as though I'm watching a movie, and when I transcribe the events I often forget to add other sensory detail.

I'm still not good at fixing that.

i'm the same way, sol. action is definitely one of my many literary failings. i think the comment about the climax being more detailed is excellent to note, though that's not usually the time characters have a blow-by-blow slugfest.

i'm usually very minimalistic about actual fisticuffs. if you hit an average person in the gut, it hurts. your vision gets blurred. you're actually rather stunned for a moment. so, my characters never can take too much punishment that's unrealistic. no one can get hit in the face fifty times with bare knuckles and still walk away. and with a cut lip and that's it, to beat all.

i only count bullets when revolvers are involved. if they're kung fu experts, something along the lines of, 'they exchanged blows with lightning speed,' (okay, that sucked, buy you get the idea). of course, when one of those kung fu guys lands a serious blow, obviously you mention that. two bums throwing sloppy punches in the street can, if it needs to be explained, be told with detail because those fights are usually quick, hardly the fight scene you see in 'they live,' where roddy piper fights the black guy in the alley for twenty minutes and gets kneed in the crotch fifteen times and doesn't require testicular surgery.

if in a trench situation, for instance, i'd mention how the bombs and bullets were flying, probably pitch in a few details like the ground quaking and whizzing of bullets and such, then only detail those the character either notices for some reason or has to do directly with him, like an explosion ten feet away or a peel of bullets ripping up the ground right as his feet.

i'm reworking an old story right now with lots of this kind of action in it, and it's something that just doesn't play to my strengths eventhough i can visualize it perfectly clear. it's difficult not to be redundant sometimes.

in essence, i just highlight certain points of a fight. the detail of the conclusion depends on how important the fight is: indiana jones knocking a nazi out hardly requires a tremendous amount of words even in its conclusion unless there's something humourous about it.

No, but final battles are often important. I remember a fantasy book I read recently that had page after page of the most tedious, insufferable, Celtic crapola, only to handle the ultimate confrontation between good and evil with 'An epic battle ensued.'

I've really been having fun writing action scenes lately, though most of the fights are fairly quick exchanges.

I definitely see the choreography, but I try to keep the sentences as quick as the camera shots would be - as quick as the fighter's thoughts and movements would be.

Here's a recent example of how my action heroine uses the element of suprise to survive a sticky situation at an all-night mini-mart in the middle of nowhere.

-----------------------------------//

“Hate to break up the party, but the dot-head up on North Avenue said there’d be coffee in here.”

The Ox turned and smiled at her. He scanned her body, toe to head, and said, “Hey, turn to the side and bend over a li’l bit. I wanna see more of that ***.”

The clerk laughed and leered at her, “We have coffee right over there, Ma’am.”

She folded her arms and stood her ground, “That’s not coffee. They call it sludge, where I come from.”

The clerk glanced to his bulky friend and back. “At ten-to-ten, that’s coffee.”

Ox approached, and with a meaty hand, brushed her arm tenderly, “You want me to get it for you?” The crude tattoo under his sleeve, said he’d done time in prison.

With a silent spin-kick, she buckled his legs and shoved him. He crashed on his back, and she kicked him in the balls. “Don’t you have someplace better to be?”

He cringed like a quarterback, racked in a pile-up.

She picked up a quart of oil, and with a pitch, bounced it off his head. “You’re done with your business. Get the hell out of the gas station.”

He scrambled to his feet and drew back a fist, “*****…”

She reached into her jacket and yanked out the thirty-eight. Putting it in his face, she said, “I don’t want you to walk!”

He broke out the side-door and ran off into the night.

Putting her gun away, she turned to the astonished clerk and said, “I need the key to the bathroom.”

In nervous fits and starts, he jerked the key off its hook and handed it to her. “Anything else?”

“Make some coffee.”

i alternate between high-level and low-level descriptions.

generally, i start with teh description of some specific actions, then gradually unfocus. i pull back and discuss abstractedly the style of the two combatants, who hasa the upper hand, and why. if there are any other scenes going on, this is where i switch. throughout the rest of the fight, i zoom in to show specific moves when they are turning points, and always show the details of the end.

I think your description should be as in depth as the book itself calls for. If the action is a major part of your book, sure, spend a lot of time on it. If it isn't, then keep it brief.

But something important to remember about action, which Hollywood often forgets, is that action, particularly fights, is character based. Not every character should fight the same way. The moves they choose should actually come from the character. Where did this character learn to fight from -- growing up in the street? Watching TV? this should be reflected in his fighting style. Also it's a good chance for a character point. Why does he protect his heart more than his head -- or that sort of thing.

(my biggest pet peeve is when police and thugs fight exactly the same way in books or movies -- are you kidding me? they would not fight the same way)

Mostly I can't stand fighting for fighting's sake. The best fights have thought behind them.

As for having depth fight scenes, some of them can be very good. In Chinese wu xia fiction, it's all fighting, that's the point of the stories. And the fights can be very extended but also highly engaging to read.

Also, when it comes to movies in books, you can always look at how those fights were written in fight club the book. Also you could look at the Lord of the Rings movies and see how those are written in the book (I don't remember helm's deep, for instance, being as long in the book as in the movie). Just to get an idea...

Good luck!

where you've got a large army, what filmmakers used to do before CGI essentially fought their own battles and built their own background character details (like in the LOTR movies), you'd have the characters that were in the foreground all duded up, while those running around slashing and hacking in the distance got much less costume detail and choreographed action, for obvious reasons. that can be translated to a story, too, and that's generally the approach i take. often, in big battles scenes, i'll focus on a nameless soldier as long as i can work him into the character's situation.

so, while i tend to 'zoom in', 'zooming out' has its own dramatic element which is different. i 'zoom out' at the end of a battle sometimes, when there's not going to be anything that happens directly after the fighting is done. 'zooming out' gives you a sense of scale, but you also have to return to your character, and for me that's more problematic than had i just zoomed in to illustrate the scale, focus on the character, and go from there. that's just me, of course: i don't try to get real fancy, just try to let the reader know where things are, roughly the scale, and during the fight figure out a way to let the reader know how things are going. i always write about the soldier, though, so if your character is a general, i'd think your approach would be much more encompassing.

preyer said:

i'm usually very minimalistic about actual fisticuffs. if you hit an average person in the gut, it hurts. your vision gets blurred. you're actually rather stunned for a moment. so, my characters never can take too much punishment that's unrealistic. no one can get hit in the face fifty times with bare knuckles and still walk away. and with a cut lip and that's it, to beat all.

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The first solid blow in the right spot ends 90% of all fights, but you certainly can get hit in the face fifty times with bare knuckles and still walk away, though you'll have more than a cut lip. Have you ever watched a real bare knuckle prize fight?

Faces generally withstand punishment better than knuckles. There's the notion that boxing gloves are used to protect the other fighter's face, but it does this only minimally. Wrapped hands and boxing gloves are there to protect the fighter's hands. Without gloves, your hands will probably give out before someone else's face. It takes very few blows to someone's face to ruin your hands. Knuckles break, joints dislocate, your hands swell almost immediately, and they hurt like blazes.

And inevitably, many of your blows will land on the foreheard, the side of the head, etc. And without gloves, even a blow to the chin will cause a broken knuckle about as often as not.

It does, of course, depend on the fighters, but to someone in good physical shape, a blow to the gut doesn't hurt. It can take dozen of blows to cause any physical distress, and then it usually comes in the form of shortness of breath, not pain. This is why it takes eight or nine or ten rounds of body blows to slow most professional boxers down.

I have a son who simply can't be hurt by a body blow. He's taken the best anyone can give, including boxers who weighed 280 pounds.

Some people also swell and cut easily, and others swell hardly at all, and almost never cut.

Some people are also nearly impossible to knock out. A knock out is caused by the brain slamming against the side of the skull, which is why most knock outs occur when the side of the chin is hit. That's the "button" because it snaps the head violently to one side, slamming the brain against the skull.

But some people have little or no space between the brain and the skull, so the brain and skull tend to move as a unit. Such men are almost impossible to knock out.

How you portray a fight depends entirely on who the fighters are. But what's really unrealistic is a guy actually hitting someone in the face fifty times with his bare knuckles. After the first four or five solid punches, odds are he will never want to punch anything ever again. After those first few punchs, his hands will probably be in poor shape, and subsequent blows he lands won't be as hard or as punishing. He'll wince with every punch, and whether he means to or not, he'll be pulling his punches because of the pain.

no, never saw a bare-knuckle prizefight-- where would you watch such a thing? the key here is 'prizefighter.' hang out in a bar long enough and you'll see your share of barfights, and these are really ordinary people. crack someone's ribs with a good one, and he'll spit up some blood. i've had to watch my buddy do that, and it sucked. it hurt him enough to kick back for the rest of the melee. and i saw a guy flat-out clock him square in the face that dropped him like a rock. he got up, but he was dazed. had the guy not seen me coming, my buddy would have been toast.

i'll grant that if you do 500 sit-ups a day and someone gives you a stomach blow, you can take it. the average person? hm. seeing as how the average person doesn't go to the gym that often, i question that. you take one to the solar plexus, and your vision is muddy, that i know from personal experience. and if you bang around a guy's head, you might break his nose, and the 'average' person is effectively done after that. break my nose, fight's done. don't get me wrong, i know a few people who you could beat with a crowbar and it not phaze them one lick-- these are not regular guys, though, adrenaline or not.

when you box, you have to take into consideration the fact that there are different ounce gloves that, indeed, cause varying impacts. that's one major reason why sugar ray leonard beat hagler, because leonard worked it into the contract they had to fight using the weight he wanted. wearing a mouthpiece is crucial to lessening the damage, too. without mouthpieces, these guys wouldn't have lips after awhile, lol. having had the opportunity to hang out with aaron 'the hawk' pryor several times, i tell ya the end result of 'prizefighters' ain't pretty. nice guy from what you can understand of what he's saying. another thing is, these guys have to have their hands registered as lethal weapons.

you're right, it hurts like hell to punch someone's head sometimes. i still have a scar on my hand where i knocked a guy's tooth out, and i'm glad that's where the fight stopped. here a couple of years ago i thought i'd broken a knuckle on a guy's windshield, and it took about a week for the swelling and pain to go away. hitting a guy in the forehead is gonna hurt, especially if he's not rolling with the punches. and if a boxer's hand is wrapped wrong, he'll break his hand on his first punch. boxers also fight in a stylized way, so it's really a poor example of how a realistic, extended fight would proceed in real life, where someone might pick up a board or pipe and smack the other guy in the thigh if he had to. it's not more believable than the hero getting shot in the upper chest and laughing it off. 'hell, yeah, it hurts, but i'm still having sex with you tonight, baby.' anyway, my understanding of one of the first things they teach you when you go into a boxing gym is you shouldn't be there if you want to learn self defense.

my point is, pull an aveage guy off the street and put him through the same punishment, say, indiana jones took while fighting the german mechanic (around the nazi airplane in the first movie), and it's going to be a quick fight. normal people in real life don't rebound nearly as fast as they do in the movies. kind of like when you kick someone in the crotch, they just shake it off and five seconds later are running around like nothing ever happened. uhm, not true, lol. even prizefighters wearing protection are given, what, five minutes for a low blow to recouperate?

i'd always heard the best way to knock someone out is with an uppercut. it 'cuts' the same way as JR described, i think, but your chances are better with an actual knock-out blow as opposed to a side-hit. that's why, too, when you hit someone square in the face, it more often than not stuns them for a moment... and brings on major reconstructive surgery (seen that one, not pretty). an uppercut to the nose can kill someone, though.

I guess it depends on who your characters are. If it’s an average guy who sits in an office all day and watches TV at night then things are going to be different than if it’s a construction worker who hangs out in bars all the time. And that’ll be different from the guy who runs 5 miles a day or the guy who works out or the guy who smokes etc.

As far as the broken nose – that’s not necessarily so. I had my nose broken and it didn’t even phase me. Even after all was said and done, people kept telling me my nose was broken and I kept laughing them off because I didn’t feel anything - I thought I just had a bloody nose. Wound up having two black eyes for a week and now my nose is slightly skewed. LOL!!

And I don’t think I’ve yet to see the fight that didn’t disintegrate into a wrestling match after only a few blows.

Plus, if the person smokes or has a pretty sedate lifestyle – they will become winded very, very quickly. I’ve seen humongous guys get pummelled because they had no wind, no stamina. Once they were struggling to breathe, they were like oxen bought before the slaughter….

Plus JAR is right about the hands. My right hand looks slightly deformed where one of my knuckles got pushed back from a blow to someone’s head. Stick to the pressure points LOL!!!

Just some thoughts….

Hands and lips are what authors fail to mention in fights. And eyebrows. Fingers are so easy to damage; my left hand has two fingers that can't move through an entire range of motion, just because I tried block a light blow.
If you get punched or elbowed in the head, chances are you're going to end up with swollen/split eyebrows. This seriously impedes vision.
Busted lips; ingesting blood during a fight dehydrates the fighter and sends messages to your brain to shut down and rest, because the normal body should never be tasting its own blood. That, and most people get nauseous from the taste of blood. (Although, according to Fight Club, the human body can ingest a pint of blood before vomitting.)
Groins; on another note, authors always only have men kicked or kneed in this tender spot. Why then in real life do women wear cups in combative sports?
In non-real fights, adrenaline seems to last for ever, but what most people don't know is that adrenaline is an energy spike, followed by a dip. Right after the surge of energy, you really need someplace safe to sit down and faze out for a while as your body recoupes.
And the avergae fight lasts only a few minutes.

black winged fighter said:

Hands and lips are what authors fail to mention in fights. And eyebrows. Fingers are so easy to damage; my left hand has two fingers that can't move through an entire range of motion, just because I tried block a light blow.

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...and armoured fights - in sword and sorcery - should be messier and nastier... two blokes wrestling with swords held like quarter staffs, trying to jam the point into the armpit, groin, thigh, back of elbow, palm, or even hook it down the cuff of a gauntlet.

Generally, I choreograph significant bits of action scenes, but summarise and evoke the transitions. E.g. When Sir Ranulph carves his way through an army, that's summary. When he encounters named adversery, they face off, adopt guards and trade detailed blows. Even so, most of the description goes into the pre-fight, since combat itself usually last three or four strokes.

Ask yourself what the fight is doing in the story. Is it advancing the plot? Revealing character? Supporting the theme?

It must do at least one of those three.

One of the major problems I have with fight scenes in books as opposed to films, is the pages leading up to a point of conflict are often slick and quick, then the fight comes along and I find myself skim reading the block of description that is often excrutiatingly slow considering the heat of the lead in.

It's the change of pace that drags the book to a halt for those who want to decipher the scene. Okay so his foot goes here and the other guy's elbow is here, cool got it, then he falls this way...



Os.

zornhau said:

...and armoured fights - in sword and sorcery - should be messier and nastier...

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Yes, anyone who's ever sparred, even just for fun, knows how quickly the arm muscles tire, how difficult it is to place a blow. Sure, the hero/heroine has trained and all, the reality of the situation is that after the first power blows, both fighters' swords will start to drag at their arms.
I've sparred with people after having trained considerably. Adrenaline flows, and the blade goes places. It's over so quickly.

I find that my experience comes in very handy when writing fight scenes.

I have fenced in college, been in the SCA as a heavy fighter off and on for twenty years and am currently a sho-dan in Kendo. That, plus my military background makes writing the fight scenes fun.

Having a degree in Medieval History doesn't hurt either.

Richard, that's some truly useful experience; I'm jealous!
But yes, an insider's viewpoint on fighting scenes comes in very handy and makes those scenes so interesting to craft.
(Oh, and I know of the SCA. Debating on joining someday...)

black winged fighter said:

Richard, that's some truly useful experience; I'm jealous!
But yes, an insider's viewpoint on fighting scenes comes in very handy and makes those scenes so interesting to craft.
(Oh, and I know of the SCA. Debating on joining someday...)

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Yeah, one of the nice reviews I got on Amazon was regarding the "realistic" fight scenes in my novel.

Course, you'll note I took three of the least useful martial arts for self-defense. "Time out! I need to pick up this stick here! OK, now you can get back to mugging me." )

Then again, if I ever decide to use a walking stick/cane, I'm in good shape. Probably less chance of the local gendarmes coming after me unlike carrying that M-16 I was taught to use.

I've always stuck with the very functional arts. It's strange reading all the romanticized fight scenes out there, and then I sit down and write a very bare, very brutal, and above all short exchnage. Well, at least where hand-to-hand is concerned.

black winged fighter said:

I've always stuck with the very functional arts. It's strange reading all the romanticized fight scenes out there, and then I sit down and write a very bare, very brutal, and above all short exchnage. Well, at least where hand-to-hand is concerned.

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Yep.

Witty reparte in the middle of a fight is best left for Spider Man.

Most fighters are too winded to do much more than grunt at each other after a few seconds.

Whenever I think of fight scenes, I have to think about the "Quiet Man", which for the most part was a lot of fists flying and grunts with only the occasional quip (usually when someone was trying to get their breath back) or the sword fight from "The Princess Bride" between Westly and Inigo or "Robin Hood" between Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone.

I should be so lucky to write a scene that good.

Drawn out fight scenes interspersed with long discussions remind me of death scenes in operas. *grins*

Question slightly OT but still related to fighting descriptions. How much description would I need for a fight involving a mech (think MechWarrior, but smaller vehicles), and an elephant-sized monster?

The mech's current configuration (the "Saber Mech" configuration) allows the pilot to either shoot or melee (only one or the other at any given time). The weapon system on this mech consists of a power pack worn like a backpack, and an exoskeleton to give the mech additional power/support to swing the arms in melee. The weapon itself consists of a blade on either arm, which opens up when shooting, or closes together so the pilot can melee (imagine taping a long knife to the back part of your hand, and imagine that the blade can open up to shoot, and you'd have a good idea of what the weapon system is like on the mech. And before you ask why they even need to melee, it's because I felt that being able to shoot and melee was cool and added some uniqueness to my overall story. My main focus in this story is fleet on fleet battles in space/above planets, but I thought that showing some ground fights would be cool too. And if nothing else, the monsters are more resistant to the laser shots than the enemy mechs, but they're slightly weaker in melee fights, esp against the large blades on this mech configuration).

The point of this fight scene is that the mech pilot (there's some other ones there too though, but I focus on this one guy) is sent out to secure a crashed transport ship, when the enemy starts to approach it with their mechs and monsters. They have to defend the crash site until transports arrive to pick up survivors (which unfortunately get targetted by the enemy mechs before they can pick up the survivors).

Would I need to describe every swing the mech pilot makes when he starts to melee the monsters (since melee is much more powerful than the laser shots against the monsters)? Or can I generalize most of it (which will probably cheapen the scene overall) until the mech pilot's friends arrive with air support (inc. the main hero, who was busy fighting enemy aircraft in another area)? This is just a small part in the overall scene (since there's a huge battle going on just above the planet), but it's vital because the hero's girlfriend and several of his other friends are at the crash site, hence why the scene is so important.